All in the family?

 By James M. Jackson

Later this year, I will publish Niki Unbound (Niki Undercover Thriller #3). It will be my eleventh novel. In addition, I have written one non-fiction book and two novellas—a reasonable output for someone whose first book wasn’t published until his sixties.

However, that oeuvre does not make me the most prolific author in my family. And I am far from the most notable. Here’s the scoop:

Dr. James C. Jackson

My great-great-great-grandfather James Caleb Jackson is the most notable. He was a well-known abolitionist speaker in the 1840s; in the 1850s his attention turned to health, and he founded a “health resort” focused on good water, exercise, and a vegetarian diet. He invented the first “ready-to-eat cereal,” Granula. (You know granola because the Jacksons sued the Kelloggs for patent infringement and won, and Kellogg had to change the name of his product.)

In addition to his work as editor and owner of various anti-slavery newspapers, he published 11 books (per Wikipedia), all nonfiction, including titles such as How to Treat the Sick Without Medicine, and Dancing: Its Evils and its Benefits. Some of those books, like Dancing are quite short.

In the Jackson line, we skip four generations to the next published author, my father. His textbook, A User’s Guide to Principal Components, published by Wiley in 2003, is still used for graduate-statistics courses. He also published a variety of historical pamphlets and the book, The Castles on the Hill, which detailed the history of the Jackson Health Resort and its subsequent lives.

Dr. Albert Tracy Leffingwell

Looking at my family writ large, I have prolific cousins as well. Dr. Albert Tracy Leffingwell was James Caleb Jackson’s nephew; therefore, my first cousin four times removed. He founded the American Society for the Regulation of Vivisection and served as president of the American Humane Society. Pertinent to this article, Wikipedia attributes twelve publications to him. I have Rambles Through Japan Without a Guide, but none of his other books (which include Vivisection in America, Does Science Need Secrecy, and American Meat).

The grand prize for number of publications goes to Albert Tracy’s son, Albert Fear Leffingwell—my second cousin three times removed. He published a book of poetry while still a Harvard student. After graduation, he became a New York advertising executive. He wrote three early nonfiction works, and then, starting in 1939, he published thirteen noir crime novels under his name and the pen names Dana Chambers and Giles Jackson.

That’s seventeen published works. He died at age fifty-one. I didn’t have my first book published until I was sixty-one! Such a sluggard, I am. In fairness to me, his novels are less than half as long as mine, so I might have the family record for the number of published words!

His novels are being republished by Stark House Press. Last month, Curtis Evans, who wrote the introduction to the republication of the first two novels, contacted me. Curt is a retired history professor, specializing in the antebellum US and post-Civil War era. He found the link between the Leffingwells and the Jacksons, ran across a blog I had written about James Caleb Jackson, and discovered I wrote crime fiction.

Long story (somewhat) short: he’s invited me to write an introduction to one of the future republications. Details remain to be worked out, but that’s one way to keep it all in the family.

Writers: do you have a history of authors in your family? Readers: is this kind of information interesting, or TMI?

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James M. Jackson writes justice-driven thrillers with brains and bite, including the Niki Undercover Thriller series and the Seamus McCree series. To learn more information about Jim and his books, check out his website, https://jamesmjackson.com. You can sign up for his newsletter (and get to read Low Tide at Tybee, a novella featuring Seamus, his darts-throwing mother, and six-year-old granddaughter, Megan).